That line comes from an article in today’s New York Times, and no, it’s not a quote from some MRA talking about divorce laws, or Bill O’Reilly sounding off about Hillary. It’s a piece by a woman named Kelly Valen about her brief membership in a sorority in college. Since it’s about a woman’s experience, it’s of course in the Sunday Styles section between an article about the Hello, Kitty! vibrator and an ad for thousand-dollar purses.
Valen recounts an undergraduate trauma: she was raped while drunk at a frat party and then drummed out of her sorority afterwards. Her rape was part of a “ledge party”, where a bunch of men watch from the window ledge while one of their brethren has sex with a woman inside.
Ledge parties weren’t merely tolerated in the fraternities — they were rewarded with knowing winks and backslaps. But my date had crossed a line: Apparently the fraternal code of ethics only approved of the performances when the girls were conscious (albeit still unaware they were being watched).
Valen’s rapist apologies to her and to his brothers (to his brothers? Huh?) but that’s not enough. The fraternity responds by blackballing the guy, who drops out of school. And no, it didn’t occur to anyone that this was a criminal act; Valen says “we simply didn’t think of it that way”.
And then Valen is blamed by her “sisters”.
Branding the incident my fault, they said I deserved my fate and further complained that I had brought shame upon them all. They laughed at me, gossiped some more, then distanced themselves. I was dirty to them — and dirtier to myself.
Eventually they toss her out, sending her back into the dorms to live among the great unwashed.
It’s not surprising that this incident has haunted Valen, that she finds herself shaken and in a “morbid funk” after running into the ringleader of the sorority in a Gymboree twenty years later. But it’s not groups of men who make her anxious these days, it’s the specter of what she calls “group female intimacy”.
In the two decades since, I’ve been a full-time lawyer, a working mother and a stay-at-home mother. In each role, I’ve found my fears about women’s covert competition and aggression to be frequently validated: the gossip, the comparisons, the withering critiques of career and mothering choices. We women swim in shark-infested waters of our own design. Often we don’t have a clue where we stand with one another — socially, as mothers, as colleagues — because we’re at once allies and foes.
What a grim, painful image of the society of women. There’s a lot of pain in this story, and it makes me sad and angry at the same time. I’m not really angry at her, but at the box so many women find themselves inside. Set up by the patriarchy to see other women as rivals, to build status by getting the “best” guy, to accept misogyny and abuse and even rape as the cost of doing business and living in the world. It’s hard to be direct and authentic with each other when we can’t be direct and authentic with ourselves. The messages about how we’re supposed to act and look and shop and work raise our kids are so overwhelming that it’s easy to lose who we are, really.
And part of what makes me so sad about this article is that it reminds me of my own experiences.
Thank God, I’ve never been raped, but there were years of my life when I would have agreed with Valen about the menace of being with women in a group. For me the sorority house was a summer camp bunk, where I spent four years as the misfit fat kid with no athletic inclinations, a ridiculously adult vocabulary and a remarkable lack of social skills. At least once a summer some girl would pretend to be my friend only to turn around and use the information she’d gained to taunt me. It’s not surprising that in high school and college I had mostly male friends. There were girls in the mixed groups I hung out with, and I actually had close relationships with my roommates my last two years of college, but I would no more have joined a sorority than I would have jumped off the roof, even if there had been sororities at my college. There was a Women’s Center, but I never once set foot in the place. My advisors and mentors were men; my professional role models were men. I didn’t identify as a feminist, in large part because I couldn’t identify with other women.
That all changed for me in medical school and residency, when I realized that my experiences were deeply different than those of my male classmates, and I saw the inequities in the ways women were treated as patients and as professionals. I began to identify as feminist during my third-year OB/Gyn rotation, and began to seek out women as mentors and friends during residency.
Valen asks
how do we help our girls navigate the duplicitous female maze? How do we ensure that they behave authentically, respect humanity over fleeting alliances, and squash the nasty tribal instincts that can inflict lifelong distress?
and all I can say is: make the patriarchy visible. Speak your own truth about the ways in which misogyny has marked your life and connect with those who hear you. Have empathy for the women who support the status quo, who are in their own way reacting to social pressures, but don’t accept their judgments of you – or of themselves. Hold real pride in who you are, in the strengths and talents of your body and mind. It’s a lot to ask, and most days I fall short, but I am deeply grateful that as I keep working at it I am in the company of women.